


Nothing But Our Choices

by Ibelin



Series: Life and What Comes After Verse [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Anakin Goes To Therapy, Anakin Takes Baby Steps Toward Not Falling to the Dark Side, Anakin tells Mace Windu about the Tusken massacre, Angst, Gen, Jedi Philosphy, Mace Windu is Tired, POV Mace Windu, Sort Of Willingly And Sort Of At Gunpoint, There Is So Much Talking In This
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24225193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ibelin/pseuds/Ibelin
Summary: Mace Windu strode to meet Skywalker, knowing he was in for an explosion. With Skywalker, everything was an explosion of some kind — both the good and the bad, and often literally.This, he thought, was going to be a big one.(LAWCA 'verse. 22 BBY. Obi-Wan is presumed dead on Jabiim, Anakin is newly knighted, and Mace Windu realizes just what he has inherited.)
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Mace Windu
Series: Life and What Comes After Verse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1349374
Comments: 77
Kudos: 421





	Nothing But Our Choices

**Author's Note:**

> This is an interlude that takes place in the time-skip between chapters 1 and 2 of [Life and What Comes After](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7944052/chapters/18230086). For this to make sense, you probably want to read LAWCA chapter one since this is pretty much a direct follow-up.

Mace Windu strode to meet Skywalker, knowing he was in for an explosion. With Skywalker, everything was an explosion of some kind — both the good and the bad, and often literally.

His steps slowed as he entered the briefing room. 

This, he thought, was going to be a big one.

Skywalker stood before a lighted holotable, arms crossed and posture dangerously rigid. His eyes were vague, tracking the slowly-rotating map projected by the table, but not really seeing it. As always, he was a web of stress vectors in the Force, an impossibly tangled knot of pure significance. It was still astounding. Still horrifying. 

Mace couldn’t look at him very long before his palms began to itch. From the day he first met Skywalker, he had felt that to be near him was to be in a fight for your life.

It was not this that gave him a bad feeling about this particular meeting, though. That came because of Skywalker’s unnatural stillness. The clone standing beside him saluted, but he didn’t move when Mace walked in. His shoulders were braced as if the weight of the universe rested on them, and his jaw was set. Skywalker was never still. Not like this.

“Well?”

“Master Windu, I would like to report the capture of Arantera. The Separatists have been driven from the planet.”

Skywalker had turned and arranged himself in a facsimile of attention, hands clasped behind his back. He wore a carbon-scored plastisteel chest plate and gauntlets over his new tunics, a combination of slate-gray and a deep burgundy, and his short hair had just begun to grow out of his padawan cut. General Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight, calm and professional. 

Mace just looked back at him evenly. He recognized Obi-Wan’s serenity in Skywalker’s posture, but he wore it like a child in ill-fitting hand-me-down clothes.

“Where,” he asked, “is your captain?”

The soldier at Skywalker’s side held his helmet pinched neatly under one arm, dark eyes looking out from Jango Fett’s dead face, but he wasn’t the usual escort. Mace had noticed already how Skywalker’s assigned clone captain had begun to gather his own connections in the Force, every day at Skywalker’s side binding the man more irrevocably into the cascade of deadly shatterpoints that circled Skywalker like planets in orbit.

Skywalker blinked. “Rex is in the medbay, Master.”

“Indeed. I hope he is not injured too severely.”

“He will recover.”

Letting the silence stretch, Mace waited. 

Finally, he asked, “And how did you manage to lose the cortosis?”

Skywalker had so far kept his icy cool well for such an impatient man, but his nostrils flared and his mouth tightened against the question. “Unfortunately, the strike team sent to the mine got bogged down there and was unable to secure the shipments the Separatists had already loaded onto transports.” 

“Were the forces guarding the mine more numerous than we anticipated?”

“No.”

“Was their weaponry superior?”

“Just spider droids and the B-1s with RPS-6 shoulder launchers, as we expected.”

“Logistical complications?”

“No, Master.”

“Well then,” said Mace, delivering the final hammer blow, “the performance of the men must have been substandard.”

The clone’s outrage didn’t show on his face, but leached into the Force unmistakably. Skywalker’s, though, flashed hot in his eyes, and Mace felt the fracture open in his skin-deep control. “Absolutely not. My men are the best in the army.”

“Then, Skywalker, I’m still waiting for you to explain how you let the Separatists fly away with _ten freighters_ , all of them belly-full with refined cortosis. You know what kinds of fortifications they can make with that much ore.”

“I know,” Skywalker shot back, chest heaving with a single quick gulp of breath. More calmly, he said, “My men did their best, Master Windu. The failure was mine this time. I’m sorry.”

This, on the surface, was very pretty. Mace had seen Skywalker cast about desperately to shift blame for failures far smaller than this, in front of the Council. _It was the fault of so-and-so. If they had just listened to his original idea in the first place—_ And now here he was, taking responsibility. This, more than anything yet, made Mace uneasy.

If he was so quick to wear this, then there must be something much worse under the surface.

“Tell me what happened.”

“It was the P-tower,” said Skywalker. “I was unable to neutralize it fast enough, and with the mine still covered by the laser cannon, the strike team couldn’t make the approach.”

“Very nice,” said Mace. “Now tell me what actually happened.”

And there it was. Skywalker’s shields cracked, and the Force blurred with a caustic swirl of anger. “I’m sorry if you don’t believe me—”

“You can bow and scrape if you think that’s what I want, Skywalker, but we talked about this. Are you a Jedi?”

“I am! No matter what you—”

“Are you a _Jedi_?” 

His fists clenched. Mace didn’t know him the way Obi-Wan had, to be able to trade entire thoughts in the dip of a shoulder or the arch of a brow, but he could see that Skywalker understood him. 

Seekers, not saints.

Self-discipline. Responsibility. Service.

Face the truth, and choose. 

Skywalker still smoldered, but his voice was tight and even when he said, “Zeer, leave us.”

The clone saluted. He left the room, the door hissing twice, and neither of them moved. Arms still crossed, Skywalker had his face turned just enough to not look Mace in the eye. How, he thought, had Obi-Wan done this for so long? Mace was tired already.

“Skywalker.” With a careful effort, he employed the tone he would use for a frightened child instead of the one for an existential threat. “I am not your enemy. The cortosis? We’ll deal with it. You are more important. I have to know what it is that you need.”

For a moment, he thought Skywalker wouldn’t answer at all.

Then, he looked at Mace with too-bright eyes and said, “Ventress is using Obi-Wan’s lightsaber.”

Oh.

Of course she was. What a trophy that would make, and Ventress was already familiar enough with Skywalker to know how useful it would be against him psychologically. Those were Mace’s thoughts, but what he felt was the awful dread of finding Depa’s lightsaber in his hand on Haruun Kal, and fearing she was dead or perhaps worse. He could imagine well enough how it might feel to see her killer wielding it — an almost perverse obscenity.

 _You lost control_ , he didn’t say, even though it was plainly true.

Instead, he asked, “And did you retrieve it?”

The clench of Skywalker’s jaw looked hard enough to ache. His fingers, where they curled against the lip of the holotable, were pressed white. “No. But I will.”

And he would. Of that, Mace had no doubt.

“At what cost?”

Finally, Skywalker moved. He turned, whipping toward Mace with violent energy. “It doesn’t belong to her! It belongs to Obi-Wan, and I _can’t_ —”

He broke off, a shaking hand covering his mouth as if to hold back any more words. His shoulders hunched, breaths coming fast and shallow. In the Force, he was a raw nerve. Pain and fury wailed, inseparable and fierce inside him, and so _loudly_. Mace could already feel the beginnings of a headache building.

Everything about Skywalker was fragile, the way brand-new ice coating a deadly, swift-moving river was fragile. One wrong step, and you were lost forever. 

“Tell me,” he said.

“Why should I?” spat Skywalker. “Obi-Wan is dead, and I’m the only one who cares. I’m the _only_ one! I’m supposed to kriffing just stand there while she— He _made_ that lightsaber! He worked on it while I worked on my hand— He always said ‘Your lightsaber is your life’ and I said ‘Well, Master, looks like you’re on your third life. How many are you supposed to have?’ and he said ‘Nine, like a tooka-cat’ and I said ‘Better be careful then, only six left’ but he _wasn’t_ and I’m _never_ going to see him again and if _Ventress_ thinks she can just wave his ‘saber _in my face_ — You can’t ask me to do that. I can’t. You can’t ask me to just let her walk away.”

He didn’t settle. His eyes shone with unshed tears, but Mace saw how he started at grief and ended with hatred twisting his mouth into a snarl. Clearly, it was a familiar progression.

“And yet you did let her walk away. Why?”

Skywalker made a sharp gesture, as if he could knock away the question. “The cannon. My men. I felt them dying.”

Tipping his head to the side in a shrug, Mace said, “If Obi-Wan’s lightsaber is that important, it must be worth some sacrifice.” 

“Not my men’s lives! They trusted me to protect them, to take that cannon. I wouldn’t let them down,” said Skywalker, furiously turning on a dime.

“But you did.”

He blew out a harsh breath. “Yeah. I did.”

“Why?”

“I— was— angry.” The words fell from his mouth like stones. “I wanted to kill Ventress.”

“And what did you do?”

“Nothing. Four clones are dead, and she still got away with Obi-Wan’s lightsaber.”

This was the part where any other Jedi would circle back, looking critically at what they had just said, and seeking to find the truth or the lesson in it. Instead, Skywalker just shook his head and fell silent, the Force roiling within him.

“Revenge is not the Jedi way,” Mace prompted dryly.

Skywalker snorted.

Mace raised his eyebrows. “I have to be honest, Skywalker, I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to communicate right now.”

“Neither am I! You’re the one who made me come up here. I was just trying to report. What do you want me to say? 'Revenge is not the Jedi way',” he parroted. “'If you do not master your emotion, it will master you'.”

His words were a blatant mockery, and Mace did not conceal his distaste. “You dishonor your master’s memory.”

Skywalker showed his teeth, looking for a moment like nothing so much as a wounded nexu, feral and murderous. “Kriff you.”

Mace was unimpressed.

“Why do you conflate a lack of self-control with _love_ , Skywalker? Do you think Obi-Wan would feel honored by your desire to take a life? By your distraction? By your scorn for the principles he dedicated his life to? By the fact that four men are dead?”

“What do you know about it? You don’t care. You don’t care about anything!”

Sorely tempted to roll his eyes, Mace crossed his arms instead. “Why? Because I don’t shout when I’m angry? Because I don’t _kill_ when I’m angry? How do you know, Anakin Skywalker, anything of what I care about?”

“If you actually cared you wouldn’t be able to just stand there like a rock. Love is _bigger_ than self-control! It’s bigger than some kriffing detached, impersonal logic! It’s bigger than anything!”

“Yes, it is,” said Mace coldly. “And maybe you don’t care _enough_.”

The poison that coursed through Skywalker’s veins was clearly something that had been allowed to fester for far too long. Mace looked at him and thought, no more. No more backing away gingerly from his fault lines, no more giving him leeway because of his unique background, no more hoping against hope that _this_ wouldn’t be the day Skywalker’s internal thermal detonator finally exploded.

Something dark and sick coiled within him. Mace could almost see it — an old, infected wound much deeper than the new one. Today they would lance it, once and for all.

Before Skywalker had a chance to dig himself a deeper hole, he said, “This interview isn’t going anywhere. We are moving out, and I don’t have time to go in circles for hours. We will speak again at the end of the day. I suggest you take that time to center yourself, and think about what it is you actually want.”

“Master Ti—”

“We are all going to the same place. You will stay aboard the _Endurance_ until I dismiss you.”

Mace didn’t tell him that if he ever wanted to see his command again, he better have something to say for himself. He could feel the way the Force lashed around Skywalker, and knew that he already understood.

xxx

At the beginning of the second dog watch, Mace went to his small practice dojo and took a seat on the floor.

The room had previously been meant as some kind of officer’s lounge for the ship’s admiral and his high-profile political guests, with rich furniture, dim lighting, and decanters in almost every cupboard. Its proximity was convenient to the officers’ quarters, so Mace had repurposed it. Now the room was almost completely bare, only light brown mats from the Temple covering the floor and cushions stacked in the corner for meditation.

He had worked for the rest of the day with hardly a free minute, but the issue of Skywalker had been ever present in the back of his mind. He was not looking forward to this conversation.

When Skywalker appeared, he didn’t look as if he were looking forward to it either. He had shed his armor and only looked younger in his new tunics and red-rimmed eyes, despite the conspicuous lack of a padawan braid. The look he swept over Mace was curiously blank, as if he didn’t even see him, but he silently took a seat on the floor in the mirror of Mace’s own position. 

They had from early on defined their relationship in opposition to one another. While Obi-Wan had been there to act as his apprentice’s partisan, it had been Mace’s role to be the counterweighted voice. Characteristically, Skywalker had always taken that personally. In the interests of strict honesty, Mace had to admit that it was, a little bit, personal. 

Now, he had to somehow do both, or else they would all suffer the consequences.

“Skywalker, I am ready to listen to you,” he said. “Are you ready to speak?”

It was the language that would be used in a formal Council inquest. Despite Skywalker’s illustrious career of questionable decision-making, he had never yet been given cause to know that. He just nodded, eyes on the space of mat between them.

“Master Windu, I want to say that I am sorry. Both for my loss of focus during the battle and for my disrespect to you earlier today. I allowed my anger to control me, and the men who died today are my responsibility. You were right that Obi-Wan wouldn’t want that. He was unselfish, and would always want me to be the same.”

Interesting, Mace thought, that he used the word _selfish_. 

Perhaps a sign of some deeper self-awareness that he didn’t think Skywalker had consciously reached yet. The rest was well put together, but he had started out that way earlier as well. Skywalker had two sides when confronted: one the heights of insolent, antagonistic infallibility, and the other fear of rejection, the depths of penitent uncertainty. Both had the feel of an ingrained self-defense mechanism. If Mace pushed him, he was sure he would quickly flip again.

As he thought, the silence stretched. Skywalker didn’t move from his submissive posture, neck bent and eyes on the ground.

“I appreciate those words,” Mace said. “I know it is not easy to admit a fault, especially to someone you dislike.”

He didn’t move, but Skywalker peered at Mace through his eyelashes as if trying to gauge how much of a threat he presented. A wild animal with raw Force strength triple that of any Jedi.

“When we spoke in the Temple, I said I did not want to see you fail. I meant that. I do not call attention to your mistakes because they give me any satisfaction, or because I want you to be ashamed.”

“A correction is a gift without price,” mumbled Skywalker, quoting a Jedi adage.

“Skywalker, look at me.”

His head jerked up, as if yanked by a string.

“You told me that you are a Jedi. Every person faces sorrow in their life, but the Jedi Order is about to walk through a very deep darkness. We have only just begun to fight this war. Think of what you have already experienced. If you continue as a Jedi, you will lose men. You will kill men. Innocents will die, and you will feel it. People you care for will continue to die, some of them while you are lightyears away, some perhaps in your arms. If you continue as a Jedi, this is what you will have to carry.”

“Nowhere is safe from that,” said Skywalker, with the bitterness of experience. “Nowhere.”

“You are right. But we are driving directly into the teeth of every evil life has to offer. That is the journey we have begun, and if we are to come out the other side—”

_“If?”_

“—we cannot afford a single moment of concession to the enemy.”

“The Separatists.” When Mace said nothing, Skywalker added, “The Sith.”

“That is what I thought at first, too. But I realized something on Haruun Kal. Do you know what Protocol Base Delta Zero is?”

Mace had followed all of Ki-Adi’s reports on Skywalker’s progress — how he had put in tireless work after Obi-Wan’s death, transforming himself into one of the Order’s most educated military minds in only months. He was not surprised when Skywalker’s expression instantly sharpened with understanding.

“What if, instead of wasting time and blood taking each Separatist target, we simply eliminated them from above? Imagine how many clones and Jedi we could save.”

“The civilians.”

“What civilians?” said Mace, watching Skywalker carefully. “Everyone on a Separatist world supports their war effort through their economic contribution and taxes, whether they personally build droids for Baktoid or not.”

“The _children_ ,” said Skywalker, eyes flashing.

Mace inclined his head. “We could defeat the Separatists that way. We could destroy the Sith once again. But would we have _won_?”

The conflict as Skywalker sorted his thoughts tumbled distantly in the Force. “The Republic would have won the war, so yes. But it would have become evil.”

Skywalker’s instinctive division between the Jedi and the Republic was more than Mace had expected. It was easy to look at his fault lines and sharp teeth and forget about anything else. It was also, Mace reflected, probably difficult to seem smart when you were always standing next to Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“Exactly. The Separatists are the enemy of the Republic. For us, the enemy is darkness. Evil, fear, despair, the desire to do harm. It surrounds us, and is only deepening. We _must_ not give a single inch of ground in this, our true war, or we _will not_ survive. In comparison, the Republic’s war doesn’t matter.”

“Then what are we doing all this for?”

“We fight for many reasons, above all because if we didn’t, a state controlled by a Sith Lord would rain down destruction and suffering on the Republic, and we can’t allow that to happen. But if we lose to the darkness within ourselves, we have already lost every battle that matters. Do you understand me, Skywalker? Better win the true war, and die, and lose _everything_ — than defeat a physical enemy and in the process become the evil yourself.”

“I understand, Master.”

“But you don’t agree.”

“I do,” protested Skywalker. 

“You don’t, or your actions in this morning’s battle would have been different.”

Skywalker sat back, turning his face away in a flinch as if he’d been slapped. He glanced at Mace and then glanced away again. “I know how it must seem to you, Master Windu,” he said darkly. “Like I just talk a good talk and do whatever I want. I know that actions are the only truth, but... it’s not like that. It’s not.”

Shaking his head, Skywalker pressed his mouth into a tight line. 

After a long moment, Mace said gently, “You have done well at listening to me, Skywalker. I said I was ready to listen to you.”

“I can’t _explain_ ,” he said with an abortive, frustrated gesture. “It’s like Obi-Wan. I know he would rather have lost a fight than won by using the Dark Side. He said if you do that, you have only destroyed yourself. I want to be the same way, I really do— and I _try_ , but it’s just sometimes— sometimes it’s just too much. There’s just _so much_ , and I can’t even think about anything else.”

Mace wanted to be amused at how Skywalker seemed to be in a permanent background mental dialogue with Obi-Wan, but he wasn't. He knew what that was like.

“Can you give an example?”

“Today! As soon as Ventress showed up, she was swanning around being smart and waving Obi-Wan’s ‘saber under my nose, and I could _feel_ how happy it made her that he was dead, and I just— All I could think about was how _kriffing happy_ she was and I just lost track. I just feel so much until I can’t stand to feel anything else, I have to _do_ something. And I didn’t even realize what was happening, until I felt Rex get wounded.” 

Skywalker’s eyes were welling with moisture again, and Mace hoped that he wouldn’t cry. He wouldn’t know what to do with a crying Jedi Knight.

“And it’s not just that. It’s every day. Even if nothing bad is happening, I still feel it. It’s every day, just so hard and so heavy. It’s like I’m being crushed underneath, just walking around carrying this huge weight every single minute, and I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know what to do. And sometimes I just can’t take it anymore.”

“Did you tell Obi-Wan about how you feel?”

The way he rubbed his sleeve against the side of his nose, shrugging, answered before he did. “Kinda.”

“What did he say?”

“He said— that he couldn’t bear my burden. But he would help me. And he would never leave me.” Skywalker’s voice cracked clean through on the last few words.

“And he hasn’t.”

“I know that he will always be with me in the Force. And he is in my heart forever,” said Skywalker fiercely, “but it’s not the same.”

“No, it isn’t. Change is difficult.” Mace restrained himself from adding the rest, about how clinging to what you most desired would only destroy and distort it.

“My mom always said that we can’t stop change. She probably would have made a better Jedi than me.” 

After his first few years at the Temple, Mace had never heard Skywalker voluntarily speak of his mother. He didn’t know what to say, so he was silent. 

Skywalker shifted, weary and restless at the same time. “Master Windu, I don’t know what to do.”

“May I ask you some questions about this morning’s incident?”

“Yeah.”

For a moment, Mace considered. He gathered his thoughts with everything Skywalker had said, and let them flow through the Force. Deliberately, he said, “When you left the battle to chase Ventress, what were you thinking of?”

“Obi-Wan,” he answered instantly.

“What about Obi-Wan?”

“His lightsaber. That I had to get it back.”

“Why?”

“Because. It doesn’t belong to her.”

“Who does it belong to?”

“Obi-Wan!”

Mace gazed at Skywalker evenly, not saying that Obi-Wan was dead. He was part of the Force, and had no need for a lightsaber anymore. 

Skywalker flushed with something that might have been anger, and said, “Well, then, me. It belongs to me. Obi-Wan would want me to have it.”

“So, you sought the lightsaber for yourself?”

“No— I mean, it’s not—” He stared down at his hands, open in his lap, and his jaw worked as he struggled to form his feelings into thoughts, and his thoughts into words. “It’s not about the lightsaber. It’s about that Ventress was _happy_ to have it.” 

“What do her feelings matter to you?”

“Well, it’s not right! It’s not right that she killed Obi-Wan, and it’s not right that she’s _happy_ , when he’s dead. She’s taking joy in suffering — she’s evil! She doesn’t deserve to be happy, after what she did to him! It’s not right. What she deserves is to be sorry. She deserves to feel every bit of suffering she made Obi-Wan feel, and to be kriffing sorry, and to die.”

Skywalker started out in visible anger, but Mace found the matter-of-fact coldness of his last statement more troubling than his earlier emotion. He spoke of his desire to kill Ventress as if it were something so self-evident he was annoyed to have to describe it at all. “And you were the one to make her sorry.”

“Someone has to,” said Skywalker. “It’s justice.”

“Justice more important than the lives of your troops.”

Immediately, his icy expression collapsed. “No. That was a mistake. I should have waited, but I couldn’t. She was saying all this stuff, and all I could focus on was her gloating while Obi-Wan— while I—”

There it was, Mace realized. The link. _Obi-Wan was unselfish_ , Skywalker had said, and it had seemed strange, but there it was. The missing piece.

“While _you_ ,” Mace finished slowly, “were in so much pain.”

“I— yeah, I guess. I guess... I wanted to make her feel like I was feeling.”

Repeating Skywalker’s words, Mace said, “Because it’s justice.”

Skywalker shrugged one shoulder, his mouth twisting wryly. He knew that what he was saying was wrong. He knew it wasn’t the Jedi way, and more, he knew it had led to the untimely deaths of his men that morning — something he himself had freely admitted had been a _mistake_. Yet he couldn’t completely disavow the words. Even if his mind didn’t fully believe them, he still _felt_ them, and in certain moments that was stronger than anything else.

All of this, Mace saw. It was not comforting.

“Do you know what you were doing, Skywalker?”

“Yes. I was hurting, so I wanted to make her hurt too. In causing pain to another, I thought I could heal my own pain. A common, childish reaction.”

He said it with a slight frown, as if looking over someone else’s sub-par essay, and Mace almost wanted to smile. “Is that all? Search your feelings.”

“Yes. No. I don’t... I didn’t just want to hurt her. I felt like I _had_ to. I had to destroy her. If I didn’t... I don’t know. It felt like I would be destroyed myself. But Master Windu, that doesn’t make sense.” Skywalker’s gaze had gone distant as he sunk back into the memory of that moment, but when he looked up, his clear blue eyes fastened on Mace, wide with surprise and alarm.

“It doesn’t have to,” said Mace. “If Ventress were here now, do you think you would feel the same way?” 

He watched Skywalker consider it thoughtfully, and wasn’t surprised when he shook his head.

“Not right now, no.”

“Does thinking about Obi-Wan’s death no longer hurt?”

“Of course it does,” he shot back. “But I guess... I don’t know. I guess right now I realize that it’s always going to hurt. No matter what happens to Ventress, or the ‘saber. And it hurts, too, knowing that I let my men down, and I would rather avoid that new hurt than do something foolish that’s not going to change anything anyway.”

For a long moment, Mace looked at him. If he reached into the Force, Mace could feel the cracks still there, shatterpoints that one good whack with a chisel in the right place could break wide open. But Skywalker’s head was lifted, and he met Mace’s eyes steadily. He was a little melancholy, but centered and calm. 

With a single nod, he said, “Good work.”

Skywalker blinked.

“This is how it works. This—” he spread his hands to encompass the hours from the time they had met in the briefing room until now “—is what you have to do. By the time you get to that place where you lose control, where you feel like you _have_ to act or you’ll die, it’s too late. You can learn to catch yourself before it goes that far. And this is how it works. Every single time.”

By the time Mace finished speaking, Skywalker’s confusion had melted away into something like despair. “But it takes so long!”

“You will learn to do it in a fraction of a second. I will help you.” Already, Mace was mentally listing others whose assistance they would enlist. He couldn’t have Skywalker by his side at every moment, but with a tight group of supportive masters, at least one of them would be available to him at any given time. “Now it feels artificial, laborious, impossible to do without help — but it is like any other Jedi skill, and Force knows you picked those up quickly enough. With practice, it will become automatic.”

Collapsing forward, Skywalker rested his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. Exhausted despair clouded his presence in the Force. Through his fingers, he said, “Master Windu, I can’t. I’m so _tired_.”

“It is hard work, Skywalker. The hardest. Any Jedi can tell you.” Mace looked at him with compassion, remembering the days when he was young and the roaring of his own demons seemed to drown out everything else in the galaxy. “But this is something you _must_ do, or leave the Jedi Order.”

Skywalker’s eyes glittered at him through the parted black fingers of his prosthetic hand.

More quietly, he said, “If you continue on the path you walk now, I don’t need to tell you where it leads.”

Levering himself up, Skywalker nodded haltingly. “The Dark Side. Murder.”

“It may not start with some great, terrible deed — it can be as small as justifying selfishness, or doing a small wrong for what seem like very good reasons. But it feeds on itself. It is never satisfied. The Dark Side is most dangerous because it is _easy_. At first giving in to it feels right, and powerful, and satisfying.”

“Have you ever used the Dark Side, Master Windu?”

He eyed Skywalker and said firmly, “Yes.”

“Have you ever killed someone?”

Mace had, of course, killed a lot of people, but Skywalker meant _in the grip of the Dark Side_. If the question had been asked curiously or in challenge, Mace might have been alarmed by it. Skywalker was examining his own palms again, though, and the words had come out in a trembling rush as if half against his own will, so Mace answered it. “No.”

“You think I would,” said Skywalker. “You think I’m dangerous.”

Dismissively, Mace tipped his head to the side. “Every Force user is _dangerous_. Being a Jedi just means you’re able to turn it on and off.”

The look Skywalker gave him — _was that a joke?_ — was one Mace received regularly from padawans and even other masters. He sighed.

“Skywalker. We all struggle with the same thing, to an extent. You have a particular challenge, because most Jedi have been working on these skills since before they could speak, and because of your great Force sensitivity. Your feelings—”

“We’re taught to trust our feelings,” said Skywalker, but it was a weak, halfhearted point and Mace wasted no time in putting it out of its misery.

“We are taught to trust the Force, and let it guide our feelings. Your feelings hold truth, even when they are of pain or grief, but they are not the _full_ truth. Any Jedi who doesn’t understand that is a Jedi I would not trust to lead a field trip, much less a legion of soldiers in battle.”

That got Skywalker’s attention; Mace felt his startled dismay go up like a plume in the Force. “But you can’t afford to ground me. I know we’re already hurting for personnel, and you need me. No one else can do what I can do.”

Skywalker’s unselfconscious certainty would have been laughable, except that he was very nearly right.

“Do you think that we can _afford_ to indefinitely ground Master Billaba, a renowned Jedi Master and former Council Member?”

He showed hesitancy, which was good. He could stand to do it more often. “Well. She...”

Mace raised his eyebrows. “She was overpowered by her despair on Haruun Kal. Even if she wakes, she won’t enter the field again until she can prove that she is the master of her own actions. I said _better to lose the war_. Did you think I was exaggerating? Better no Jedi at all than a Jedi who loses himself. Think of Sora Bulq. Think of Dooku.”

“I’m not a _Sith_ ,” protested Skywalker.

“I didn’t say you were.” Frankly, Mace was out of practice at having to be this patient. “You haven’t sworn any oaths I don’t know about to the Dark Side, have you? Pledged your life to seek power? Used the Force to kill innocents for revenge, or for pleasure, or for material gain?”

Skywalker was silent. He held himself tightly in the Force, and picked at the edge of his prosthetic glove.

With effort, Mace held in another sigh. He had been slightly more sharp than he meant to. “What I am trying to tell you, Skywalker, is that this is the most important thing you will ever do. If you will commit yourself to learning, I will teach you to understand and accept your own emotions. When you can do that, you will be able to look your own fear in the eye without flinching. You will rule _it_ , not the other way around. No matter how great your other skills are, without this, your own power in the Force will be your enemy.” He tilted his head, trying to catch Skywalker’s lowered eyes. “Will you do it?”

Very quietly, he said, “What if I can’t?”

“I don’t say it will be easy,” said Mace, “but you can.”

He said nothing. The restless bounce of his knee had stilled, and he sat for a moment like a statue. Not even Skywalker’s own breath stirred the air, and all sense of him had nearly disappeared from the Force. Frowning, Mace leaned into it, trying to understand his strange reticence. Even if Skywalker had no intention of submitting himself to Mace’s teaching, he would expect too-hasty agreement, hollow platitudes intended to placate — not this stillness that was the opposite of peace.

What he felt made him catch his breath. How had he missed this, building around them as they talked? Possibilities spiraled out from this room in a delirious rush; in an instant, he had traveled into a hundred futures, seen the ripples of a thousand consequences spreading out in every direction from a single point, like cracks in shattered transparisteel. This was that point. 

This moment, the two of them sitting here, was a shatterpoint.

Mace sounded it, seeking guidance in the Force. What was he to say? What should he do?

“What if I _can’t_?” Skywalker repeated, his voice hushed almost to a whisper. The Force shuddered around them, the way massive buildings would tremble like leaves in the power of an earthquake. “What if it’s too late?”

Mace was not in the habit of speaking thoughtlessly, but his next words were among the most careful of his entire life. 

“What,” he said, “do you mean?”

When Skywalker looked up, his face was white. Not the white of cold or of corpses, but the clammy pale pallor of someone who is almost physically sick with fear. He was still opaque in the Force, which turned its crystal facets to Mace one after another like a flawless Corusca gem flashing in the light. 

Then Skywalker spoke, and the world shattered into atoms.

“I am not a Sith, Master Windu. But I _have_ used the Dark Side to kill. On Tatooine, I killed a village of Tuskens in revenge. All of them. Even the children.”

Mace Windu was very rarely lost for words.

He was often silent — he had learned a long time ago that in most situations, a good stony expression was as effective as ten thousand words — but that wasn’t the same. If anything, he was usually holding _back_ plenty of words that he knew came from a place of frustration or impatience, rather than truth.

Skywalker had spoken with the grim, artificial calm of a man who knows this sentence may be his last. Now he sat, rigid with the effort of remaining still when every nerve in his body wanted to flee, and waited for the axe to drop. He needed Mace to say _something_.

Mace had nothing to say.

The Force had splintered, more stress vectors than Mace had the ability to track at once spiraling outward in shockwaves as Skywalker made his confession. Now it was done — Mace hadn’t even needed to move. Skywalker had shattered it himself, and now they were living a future that might not have existed. Would it be better, or worse? Mace couldn’t tell. 

Normally a person had one shatterpoint or two. Skywalker _was_ a shatterpoint, and Mace had never been able to untangle the threads around him. This had taken him completely by surprise.

Astounding, Mace thought. Horrifying.

He had seen it — felt it. Neither was the right word, but he had gone there with Skywalker, to the darkness and heavy warmth of the low hut, to his mother’s last, broken words. He had smelled the burning flesh and heard the screams, and knew the agony and pleasure Skywalker had felt with each life that winked out.

This was the poison he had sensed inside Skywalker. This was the gangrenous infection that festered in his heart. Mace had been right, and he was not at all happy about it.

Still Skywalker waited, and all Mace had to say was, “Did Obi-Wan know?”

“No. I never told him.”

“Good.” Distantly, he was pleased that he wouldn’t have to bring Obi-Wan up on charges too, but what was he thinking? Obi-Wan was dead. 

Obi-Wan was dead, and Skywalker was a mass murderer.

The mass murderer in question had begun to anxiously twist the fingers of his flesh hand in what looked like a painful way. “Master Windu—”

“I,” said Mace firmly, “am taking a moment to think.”

Skywalker fell silent.

Standing in one swift movement, Mace began to slowly pace the length of the room. 

Skywalker moved as if to follow him, but a single hand thrown up kept him in place. Finally, Mace ran out of steps to take and simply stood. Staring straight ahead at the featureless wall, he said, “Why have you told me this?”

Behind him, he heard Skywalker rise to his feet, robes rustling softly. His shaky indrawn breath was a whisper on the edge of hearing. “You said better to lose the war, right? Well. I guess this is me losing the war.”

When Mace turned, he saw Skywalker for perhaps the first time. Not the fearful child or the dangerous predator, not even the Jedi, but the man. He stood alone with his long fingers knotted in the sleeves of his tunic, shame darkening his eyes and bracing his shoulders as if against a blow. His chin was lifted and he looked straight at Mace, and Mace saw nothing but blank despair in his face.

He was sure that Mace was going to condemn him — cast him away at the least, possibly even imprison him. 

Obi-Wan had frequently argued that the Council didn’t take Anakin’s unique past into enough account, but Mace had always seen the former slave boy. He had seen that boy in good ways and bad — in the fear Skywalker carried, in the compassion and empathy, in the instinctive self-reliance, in the way he couldn’t be wrong, couldn’t make a mistake, _couldn’t_ admit fault, because doing so awakened some primal self-protective instinct. Yet here he was.

He had spoken his greatest failure to a man who held power over him, a man he still thought of as half an enemy. He held no hope of mercy or reprieve, but still he stood, silently. And he waited. And he accepted what was to come.

Because he had taken Mace at his word.

This, he suddenly thought, was the Skywalker that Obi-Wan always saw. The man he had somehow always known was inside.

“Was that the only time?”

Uncomprehending, Skywalker blinked at him.

Mace swallowed a sigh. “Have you committed any other murders I should know about?”

Skywalker’s eyes widened, as if he had never before applied the term to himself. “No.” He thought for a moment, considering, and Mace had a sensation of absolute unreality as he waited for the Order’s newest Jedi Knight to finish evaluating every time he had taken a life. “I have killed in anger many times,” said Skywalker haltingly, “which is not the Jedi way. But they were people I would have had to kill anyway. I have not... _murdered_ anyone else.”

Well, good.

Small mercies, thought Mace.

Slowly, he walked back to stand before Skywalker. He was close enough to touch. Close enough to strike. Skywalker didn’t turn his gaze away, but Mace saw him swallow. They watched one another, the minutes stretching out of shape until they seemed like small infinities. Dangerously, crystalline fractures threaded through the Force around them. 

Mace chose one carefully, and struck.

“Give me your lightsaber.” He held out his hand, palm up. 

Skywalker’s eyes flashed and he smoked anger like a toxic cloud, and he didn’t move. For a moment, Mace was sure he had been right again. He had always been right, and was still right.

Then, Skywalker’s hand fumbled at his belt. He lifted his ‘saber and held it out, jaw clenching. With one spasm of fingers, he dropped it in Mace’s outstretched hand.

A test, and he had passed.

Looking down at the handcrafted hilt he held, Mace reached out and felt the vibration of its heart in the Force. A kyber crystal, bonded to Skywalker’s own energy. His weapon, made with his own hands. His knighthood, his place in the Order, his belonging, his safety. His life. 

And he had given it up. 

Mace had been wrong, and he was glad. He had had enough of being right.

“It isn’t too late,” he said, something he hadn’t truly known until just now.

Wary, Skywalker said, “What?”

“It isn’t too late,” Mace repeated. “I will teach you to master this. Will you commit yourself to learn, Skywalker?”

“I— but I told you— I can’t.”

He was looking at Mace as if this were the one cruelty he hadn’t expected to encounter. “I don’t minimize what you have done, Skywalker. I am keeping this.” He lifted the lightsaber. “But show me a Jedi who has never lost a battle to the Dark Side, and I will show you a liar.”

“There is no way back from the Dark Side,” Skywalker stammered.

Mace gave him a flat look. “You’re wrong. The Dark Side is not a _feeling_. It is a choice. It’s a decision. So you made it once. People are dead. Are you just going to surrender? I have to admit, I did not have you pegged as a coward, Skywalker.”

Always so easy to provoke. Predictably, Skywalker flamed up in the Force, but his control was admirable as he bit out, “Master Windu, what are you saying?”

“First, what I am not saying. I am not saying there will not be consequences. I am not saying it will be easy. But I am saying that it is not too late. There is a path forward for you in the Jedi Order, if you want to walk it.”

He hesitated, and Mace understood why. He hadn’t made any guarantees, because he couldn’t. The future was uncertain. He couldn’t promise that Skywalker would remain a knight, that he would ever return to his own command, that he would ever wield his lightsaber again. The road ahead would be a difficult one in so many ways, and he knew Skywalker had ties outside the Order. He could leave, and live a simpler, easier life.

But, Mace realized belatedly, there was one guarantee he _could_ make.

“And I will not,” he said, “leave you to walk it alone.”

Skywalker glanced once more at his lightsaber, keeping himself in tight check even though every nerve in his body had to be pulling him toward it. When he met Mace’s eyes again, Mace could tell that something had shifted.

“I want to be a Jedi, Master Windu,” said Skywalker, an echo of the words he had said not so long ago, this time laid bare by the honest knowledge of all that would mean. He was still afraid, but Mace could see a vein of unflinching stubbornness in him. The kind of stubbornness that could break every bone in its body and still look death in the face and smile through bloody teeth. 

Obi-Wan’s stubbornness, he thought.

“If you will teach me, I will learn.”

**Author's Note:**

> I read _Shatterpoint_ last week and let me tell YOU. _There_ is some Mace Windu characterization. 
> 
> I've got more chapters of this in the works, but I'm posting it as complete for now because I'm still mostly focusing on _Sometimes the Light_ and have no notion of when I'll crank them out. Hopefully this will be a decent window on how we got to Unrealistically Well-Adjusted Anakin Skywalker and an okay consolation for you guys in the meantime.
> 
> CITATIONS:  
> \- The Battle of Arantera is featured in the _Age of Republic Special 1_ comic "501 Plus One."
> 
> \- "We are not saints, but seekers," is a Jedi saying Obi-Wan quotes in _Jedi Apprentice: The Dark Rival_ by Jude Watson.
> 
> \- "Face the truth, and choose," is something Yoda says in _Yoda: Dark Rendezvous_ by Sean Stewart.
> 
> \- Depa's misadventures on Haruun Kal are covered in _Shatterpoint_ by Matthew Stover. It's not gone into here or in _Sometimes the Light_ yet, but my version of Depa's backstory is a bit of a remix of that and her canon _Kanan: The Last Padawan_ comic line story. At the moment she's still in a coma.
> 
> \- Obi-Wan says that he can't bear Anakin's burden, but that he would never leave him in _Jedi Quest: The Moment of Truth_.
> 
> \- What Mace says about the Dark Side being easy and feeling good and natural is paraphrased from something Luminara says in _Medstar: Battle Surgeon_ by Michael Reaves.
> 
> \- "The Dark Side is not a feeling," is something Jai Maruk says in _Yoda: Dark Rendezvous_.


End file.
